Arch Linux

sdct989

Member

Registered: 2021-03-16

Posts: 3

Question: Arch mkinitcpio Default Configuration Change?

I recently updated Arch after having not updated it for about a month (yeah, I know I'm a bit lazy on my update cadence). I've been running this system for about 3 years now without issue, so in general Arch has been super stable for me.

Which is why, when it didn't return after the reboot I was surprised.

When I pulled up the terminal, I saw that it couldn't find my root device:

/dev/mapper/rootvg-root

This seemed pretty obvious to me, so I booted into a LiveCD, mounted my root, and edited:

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

This was the default that was already present in the file when I opened it:

HOOKS=(base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck)

And so I added:

lvm2

Then I re-ran

mkinitcpio -p linux

This allowed me to boot back into my system and resolved the issue.

My question is, to my knowledge I've never edited the mkinitcpio configuration on this system before, and yet its worked for years. Does anyone have any explanation on why this would have stopped being included or what would have caused this?

In general, I try to stay up on the Arch Linux News, and I did notice that recently the standard compression was changed to zstd, is it possible that some other default for mkinitcpio was also changed?

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,729

Re: Question: Arch mkinitcpio Default Configuration Change?

It never had lvm2 in it by default. You would have had to edit it to get the lvm2 hook when you installed the system, but that would have created a .pacnew file when you updated.

How do you handle your .pacnew files?

Last edited by Scimmia (2021-03-16 04:32:00)

sdct989

Member

Registered: 2021-03-16

Posts: 3

Re: Question: Arch mkinitcpio Default Configuration Change?

I use pacdiff for handling my .pacnew files.

Looking at mkinitcpio more, I can see that you're right. It's just a shell script, and it hasn't changed in any significant way (other than zstd) for months.

Given that, I dusted off my backups and went through them. Sure enough, before the last update (the one before this one) I had lvm2 in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. This leads me to believe I must have been careless running through pacdiff.

Either way, thanks for giving me enough info to find my own error!